Thursday, January 21, 2021

Manifesto: The good enough voter

 

Raise your children well to prevent future Trumps. Why is the most critical fact the most ignorable? It’s not culture, poverty, racism or white supremacy, deMause’s “psycho­classes” or even Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis that determines a country’s ideo­logical leanings or the lead­ers it chooses. It’s what grows in young children’s minds and bodies during their formative years. If children are raised in anger, irrationality and pain with no satis­factory relief or release, they will more than likely grow up to find solace in others’ anger and revenge. Their deprivation frustration and their alienation will form beliefs that agree with apostles of nihilism. They will not, outside of crises, know compas­sion for strangers.

Children raised in love and respect, fulfilled from the start, will grow up to care about people. That is not equivalent to accepting a socialist philosophy, that we are every­one’s keeper. It is to accept that a society, or small societies within the larger one, are a “neces­sary family” that, given only two choices, must lean toward com­mu­nity not isolation.

I’ve been wondering if the psychological baseline of most of humanity, imprinted in the new­born and infant, is frustrated love, the result of the “not quite good enough mother.”* This ambiva­lence – love fused with frustration – may be reflected two decades later in the four- or eight-year oscillations of a society, left then right, Demo­crat then Repub­lican. We feel the impulse for love, but it is blocked. We embrace then we withdraw. We hope, then we are burned. But since love is life, it may tend to have hegemony.

Raising our children well would eventually, in a century or a millennium, eliminate this cycle.

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* Re: Donald Winnicott’s famous concept of the “good enough mother.”


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Comments are welcome, but I'd suggest you first read "Feeling-centered therapy" and "Ocean and boat" for a basic introduction to my kind of theory and therapy.